204 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
people of Brooklyn sympathized with the trolley strikers, in spite of the discomfort the strike inflicted on the city. Think how we are aroused by news of oppression even in foreign countries. The indignation aroused by the Bulgarian atrocities, by the Armenian outrages, by George Kennan's accounts of the Russian prisoners, are cases known to all. Of course, those who espouse a movement of that sort feel that the public conscience is verv sluggish and easily goes to sleep again, and that is true, too. But, after all, is it not a remarkable thing that in this great crowded globe, where men are suffering and dying every second, and where most of us need all our strength to provide bread for our own stomachs and to fight off others who are trying to step on us, there should be any interest at all in a lot of foreigners whom none of us has ever seen? Remember, too, how we winced, when the heathen at the Parliament of Religions pointed out the poverty in our own cities. All this pity, indignation, and shame are based on the sense of humanity. They are human beings who suffer, and human beings are too good to suffer thus. The argument of the political economist who says that this is the struggle for existence, and that this suffering works out the greatest good in the end ; the pious sigh of the Christian Phari- see who assures us that we shall have the poor with us always and that things can't be changed till Christ comes ; and the shrug of selfish over-culture which assures us that these people are very low and sordid and desire nothing better ; they are all swept away like chaff before the feeling that a man's a man for all that, and the knowledge that human tears are scalding hot and hurt when they fall on our hearts.
Another evidence of the power which this sense of humanity has already acquired over us may be found in the attitude taken by the artistic interpreters of our thoughts. Consider the change which has come over literature since Horace wrote his "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo."
What modern poet would care to write like that? Compare with that the lesson of Sir Launfal's search for the Holy Grail, or these lines of Lowell:
